01 March 2017

The list is divided into three categories of importance: critical, high and medium. This categorisation represents the current urgency of need for new antibiotics and is intended to help guide research and development towards developing new means to combat the bacteria most threatening to human health.

The ‘critical’ category includes three types of bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and the Enterobacteriaceae family, all of which can cause potentially life-threatening infections such as pneumonia, which often affect the most vulnerable members of society. Such bacteria are now resistant to many existing types of antibiotics.